NVIDIA ION: Nouveau Competes With The NVIDIA R310 Driver

With World of Padman, the Nouveau driver on Ubuntu 12.10 was capable of a 33 FPS average while the nvidia-experimental-310 package was at a 38 FPS average.

When running the Xonotic game at low and high quality settings, NVIDIA's binary blob carried a measurable advantage each time.

Nouveau doesn't get beaten too bad compared to NVIDIA's binary blob on the NVIDIA ION platform with GeForce 9400 graphics largely since both drivers were able to control the GPU at the same clock speed (as for most NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards, Nouveau's re-clocking support is broken/incomplete). In some OpenGL games, the performance between the two drivers was comparable, but this is a low-end graphics processor that isn't too capable for running modern games and OpenGL workloads from the Linux desktop.